As highlighted in the latest issue of Nature Reviews in Drug Discovery, the incubation phase of a new Open Access platform called Sage (www.sagebase.org) should begin on 1 July, 2009. The aim of this initiative, led by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt who are leaving Merck to run it, is ‘to integrate large-scale biological information into models and then enable other scientists to leverage that information in an open access way’. It starts with a large chunk of data and information (especially expression profiling data) that they bring to the party. [...]

Today’s title refers to the perhaps unexpected origins of the recent swine ’flu outbreak, that apparently  comes not from the widespread intermingling of wildfowl and table ducks in Asia but via as yet uncertain processes in the western hemisphere. In the previous blog, I summarised some of the issues of swine flu as I saw them. Meanwhile, the e-print scientific literature is starting to become populated with some epidemiological and related analyses (I thank Fiona Tomley of our Institute for Animal Health for drawing my attention to some of them). The general consensus remains that the present outbreak is of a strain that is not excessively virulent, but that during the northern summer (southern winter) a reservoir of infection (in pigs, birds and humans) will build up and the likelihood of mutations or reassortment events producing something considerably nastier will increase significantly. [...]

One would have to be very removed from access to the media not to be aware of the 2009 outbreak of swine flu (influenza). Although it presently appears that this outbreak is barely (if at all) more dangerous than are the seasonal outbreaks of ‘traditional’ human flu (that may yet change), it raises questions about both our preparedness against pandemics (a word that implies only a widespread distribution; of itself it says nothing about virulence) and our understanding of the means by which such strains arise, transmit, infect and display virulence in humans. [...]